This invention relates to a method for manufacturing, handling and distributing firewood and to the mechanisms used to practice this method.
Firewood has traditionally been processed by manually stacking the cut and split individual sticks to form a woodpile at the location where it is cut, load the firewood from these woodpiles when it is to be transported from the place where it was cut to the place where it was to be used, manually unload the firewood and restack it. It is common to transport firewood for use in wood-burning fireplaces, as a hand stacked pile in the bed of a pick-up truck, to a selected location where it is manually unloaded from the truck bed and loosely stacked in a wood pile from which it is transported, sometimes piece by piece, to the wood burning fireplace. Such loosely stacked wood piles often prove to be unstable, fall and must be restacked. Manual handling of firewood is difficult because it is heavy and often of a size making it awkward to maneuver. The traditional way of processing and delivering firewood at an affordable price to the consumer has resulted in long delivery times and woods piles that are unstable and dangerous.
Various firewood bundling and banding machines are known which compress small bundles of firewood, apply a band around the compressed bundle and then release the compression means.
Examples of such machines are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,939,762 and 4,072,094. The machines disclosed in these patents produce a small bundle of firewood having a round cross-sectional shape. These machines contemplate compressing the bundle with mechanical compression means, banding the compressed bundle, releasing the mechanical compression means to form a bundle of firewood that expands into a tightly banded bundle. Such devices have the disadvantage that the expanded tightly banded bundles are difficult if not impossible to remove from the mechanical compression means and the round cross-sectional shape are not, when the banding is cut in the shape of a stable wood pile. Another machine for producing banded bundles of firewood having a round cross-sectional shape is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,377,362. The round shaped bundle is not convenient for handling and transporting and will not be retained as a stable stacked wood pile when the banding is released.
A wood baling machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,467,712 which produces a banded bundle of firewood having a square cross-section shape. The firewood is bundled on a pallet that is surrounded by a mold, mechanically compressed and then banded (including the pallet) after which two sides of the mold can be moved away from the bundle to release the banded bundle from the mold. After the sides of the mold are moved away from the bundle the mold remains closed at the top and the bundle must be lifted from below by the tines of a fork lift and then backed out of the mold. The square cross-section shape of the bundle, as a result of the bands extending in only one direction, does not have the integrity to retain its shape and will collapses into the unstable shape of a rhombus.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,463,667 discloses a log bundling apparatus for collecting and tying floating logs into bundles and U.S. Pat. No. 4,951,562 discloses a strapping machine for compressing a compressible load and then strapping the load into a bundle.
Although some of the above machines may be generally satisfactory for producing small bundles of firewood, they do not meet the need that this invention is intended to satisfy. It is the objective of this invention to provide a machine that can bundle and band large bundles of firewood that can be transported from the bundling cite to intermediate cites and finally to the ultimate customer where it is deposited in the form of a stable stack of wood, all without manually handling after the initial bundle is formed.
It is a further objective of this invention to provide a firewood bundling and banding mechanisms that can be used to establish a fully integrated fire wood marketing enterprise.
It is also an objective of this invention to provide the basic tools necessary to establish a firewood bundle retailing establishment.
It is a still further objective of this invention to provide the basic tools to establish an economically feasible firewood bundling and banding manufacturing process that will facilitate delivery of the banded firewood bundles to the consumer.
It is a still further objective of this invention to produce stable and safe banded bundles of firewood that can be manipulated for transporting and deposited at the consumers facility in a stable and safe configuration.